Meeting Us in Temptation

Homily for Saturday of the 1st Week in Ordinary Time

This past weekend, we celebrated the close of the Christmas season with the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. Throughout Christmas, we were constantly invited to think about how Jesus, as He stepped down from Heaven, took on our human flesh and became one of us. Today’s first reading is a reminder for us of why that was necessary for the history of salvation.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews writes: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin. So let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.”

The reason Jesus became human was to be an example for us, to show us how to fully commit ourselves to following the will of God. Through His Incarnation, He was the example of true humility, submitting Himself to suffer temptation and even undergo death, so that we could more fully understand the demands of the Christian life, but more importantly, so that we could understand just how much God loved us.

God sent His Son into the world so that He could reveal to us how He is constantly with us in those moments of suffering and trial. The Lord meets us in those moments because He endured them as well. And because He understands temptation and how we are prone to fall into sin because of the temptations we face, He meets us there as well. He didn’t dine with tax collectors and sinners just for optics. He dined with them to show us that He meets us all in the midst of our sin.

The Lord sees everything that we’ve done. He already sees it. So why hide from Him? Why refuse to bring the sin to Him? If you’ve been struggling to overcome a sin, bring it to the Lord. Go to confession and ask Him to heal it, ask Him for help in overcoming it. He’s not going to beat you up because of the things you’ve done. Instead, He’s going to love you in the midst of them and call us to conversion. The question we have to ask ourselves: Will we let Him?